William McSwain

PHILADELPHIA — Former Attorney General Bill Barr on Tuesday sharply denied that he ordered the top federal prosecutor in Philadelphia at the time not to investigate allegations of 2020 election fraud, and said Bill McSwain is only leveling that accusation to curry favor with former President Donald Trump in his run for Pennsylvania governor.

McSwain, the former U.S. Attorney for the Philadelphia region, made the claim in a June letter to Trump, which Trump made public Monday night.

McSwain wrote that he received “various allegations” of wrongdoing, but was instructed by Barr “not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities.” McSwain also said Barr ordered him to “pass along serious allegations” to state Attorney General Josh Shapiro instead of investigating them himself.

But Shapiro’s office said late Monday that McSwain never sent any, and Barr’s denial Tuesday cast further doubt on McSwain’s account.

“Any suggestion that McSwain was told to stand down from investigating allegations of election fraud is false. It’s just false,” Barr told The Washington Post. He added that McSwain’s assertion “appeared to have been made to mollify President Trump to gain his support.”

Barr said he called McSwain to complain about his letter Monday night. McSwain, Barr added, told him that “he was in a tough spot because he wanted to run and he needed Trump’s at least neutrality, if not support.”

In response, McSwain told the Post he’s sticking to his story.

The back and forth underscored how supporting Trump’s lies about a stolen election is becoming a key litmus test in GOP primaries both nationally and in Pennsylvania. It also shook next year’s competitive open-seat governor’s race. Shapiro is widely seen as the early Democratic front-runner, and some Republicans see McSwain as having a more balanced appeal than other GOP candidates who have tied themselves more closely to Trump.

No credible evidence has surfaced of any significant fraud in Pennsylvania’s election results.

McSwain, while touting the release of the letter as evidence of his commitment to “transparency,” has not responded to multiple requests for an interview to clarify whether he accepts the 2020 election results or further explain his allegations in the letter.

A spokesperson for Shapiro said if McSwain had any specific concerns about the election integrity in Philadelphia, his letter to Trump “is the first our office has heard” about them.

“We received and sent multiple referrals to local, state and federal law enforcement, but received no direct referrals from Mr. McSwain’s office,” Shapiro spokesperson Jacklin Rhoads said. “This personal note to President Trump, sent seven months after the election, is the first our office has heard of Mr. McSwain’s concerns. If he was aware of allegations of voter fraud, Mr. McSwain had a duty to report and, as he knows, our office investigates every referral and credible allegation it receives.”

McSwain never explicitly said in the letter that he actually made any referrals to Shapiro. But he suggested he would follow Barr’s orders.

“I disagreed with that decision, but those were my orders,” McSwain wrote. “As a Marine infantry officer, I was trained to follow the chain of command and to respect the orders of my superiors, even when I disagree with them.”

If no referrals were made, it would suggest that none of the allegations McSwain alluded to in his letter to Trump rose to the level of seriousness to warrant a wider investigation — or that McSwain purposefully decided not to send “serious allegations” to Shapiro as instructed.

In his letter, the former U.S. Attorney expressed distrust of Shapiro, citing statements Shapiro made before the election that Trump was likely to lose Pennsylvania.

And while McSwain complained about the directive he said he received from Barr, his letter made no specific allegations of fraud. He again refused to go into specifics in an interview Tuesday on Talk Radio 1210-WPHT’s conservative “Dom Giordano Show.”

“We received all kinds of types of allegations,” he said, obliquely referencing only vague allegations around flash drives used in voting machines. But he also appeared to acknowledge that his office did not make much — if any — progress in probing whether there was evidence to support those claims.

“I’m not making any judgments about what I would or would not have found,” he said. “But what I didn’t like was that I wasn’t free to follow the evidence wherever it leads.”